Introduction

34
Vanessa Mangione
victims and would see themselves dragged to death without ever being able
to defend themselves. (169)
As a result, in order to prevent female tyranny and domination, men should keep
their female relatives in check and women’s education should concentrate in every
respect on pleasing men, and simultaneously on the repression of their own
wishes.
Lamb is well aware of this agenda and criticises it vehemently in Glenarvon,
demonstrating the dangers the world holds for an uneducated, and therefore easily
impressed mind, as well as the effect of repressed desire on women. She agrees
with the criticism Wollstonecraft expresses of such an education and sees the
same dangers as Wollstonecraft did:
The education of women has, of late, more attended to than formerly; yet
they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers
who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged
that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a
smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are
sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,
– the only way women can rise in the world, – by marriage. And this
desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such
children may be expected to act: – they dress; they paint, and nickname
God’s creatures. – Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio! – Can
they be expected to govern a family with judgment, to take care of the poor
babes whom they bring into the world? (qtd. in Craciun 111)
Lamb adapted Wollstonecraft’s critique on female education and incorporated it
into Glenarvon. Accordingly, female education is often commented on in her work.
Mrs Seymour, Calantha’s aunt, has raised her daughters in the “proper” way and
has diminished every spark of passion and desire in them. Lamb obviously attacks
this manner of education through Lady Margaret, Calantha’s aunt:
By these means, Sophia and Frances were already highly accomplished;
their manners were formed; their opinions fixed; and any contradiction of
those opinions, instead of raising doubt, or urging to inquiry, only excited
in their minds astonishment at the hardihood and contempt for the folly
which thus opposed itself to the final determination of the majority, and
ventured to disturb the settled empire and hereditary right of their sentiments
and manners … “But, in your girls and in most of those whom we
meet, how narrow are the views, how little the motives, by which they are
impelled. Even granting that they act rightly, – that by blind following,
where others lead, they pursue the safest course, is there any thing noble,
any thing superior in the character from which such action spring?” (28-29)